18 April 2016
By Molly Ball
The Atlantic
"American socialists have never gotten far. Their heyday, insofar as they had one, was in the early 20th
century, under the leadership of Eugene V. Debs—whose likeness hangs in
Sanders’s Senate office. Debs’s fourth presidential run, in 1912,
earned the Socialist Party of America 6 percent of the vote, still the
high-water mark for a socialist candidacy; his successor, Norman Thomas,
never came close to such popularity in his six presidential runs, and
the party fell apart under the scrutiny of the Red Scare. In the 1970s, a
few successor parties emerged, among them Socialist Party USA, whose
1976 nominee, the socialist former Milwaukee mayor, Frank Zeidler, got
just over 6,000 votes. (While that party today claims to adhere to
democratic socialism, it, too, finds Sanders insufficient: In the view
of Mimi Soltysik, its 2016 nominee, Sanders’s rhetoric about the middle
class is “bullshit.”)"
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